How the Democratic process will likely conclude

Sunday, March 30, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Like everyone else (or so it seems) I have been following the Democratic nominating process, even though we're in hiatus now between the early March primaries and the Pennsylvania primary in mid-late April.

I'm an Obama supporter, so I like the way the conversation has turned back to "Why Doesn't Hillary Quit?" instead of the soul-sickening stuff we were talking about for the last couple of weeks. (Even though there was a lot of growth there.)

This morning Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo circles around all the possibilities.

1. On or before June 3, enough superdelegates declare for Obama and he wins enough delegates in the remaining 10 primaries to give him more than the 2025 delegates he needs to get the nomination. The key is that the superdelegates don't have to sit by and do nothing. Winning favor from Obama who is pretty likely the next President is going to be worth more than hedging against the chance that HRC prevails. The Clinton's currency is already heavily devalued, and it's likely to keep going down.

2. Then HRC is free to bring whatever fight she wants to the convention, it won't matter, because Obama will have the nomination, and will (correct me if I'm wrong) also control the Credentials process, so she'll have to do what he wants in the end wrt Michigan and Florida. (A more than fair resolution of Michigan and Florida, already offered, would be to split the delegates 50-50. This slightly favors HRC and dilutes BHO because he currently has a delegate lead, and that would go down after a 50-50 split. A minor point.)

3. Then all that's left in question is HRC's self-respect. If she wants to keep some of it, she'll bow out gracefully and tell her supporters to make it unanimous in Denver, or she won't and will probably retain her Senate seat as long as she wants but will always be a Democratic Party outsider. It probably won't bode well for her husband as an elder statesman, and there goes Chelsea's chance to run for President in 2024.

Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.